nestedtextto VS edn

I used the official reference implementation to make a CLI converter between NestedText and TOML, JSON, and YAML. When generating one of these formats, you can use yamlpath queries to concisely but explicitly apply supported types to data elements.

I'm a huge fan of NestedText, especially as there is no escaping needed ever.

If you ever want to use it as a pre-format to generate either TOML, JSON, or YAML, I used the official reference implementation to make a CLI converter between them and NestedText.

When generating one of these formats, you can use yamlpath queries to concisely but explicitly apply supported types to data elements.

- My CLI converter: https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/nestedtextto

- yamlpath info: https://github.com/wwkimball/yamlpath/wiki/Search-Expression...

In case you're interested and haven't seen it, I've become a big fan of NestedText, which is similar to YAML but without the complicated parts, and without types (just strings, lists, and dicts). The idea is that any meaningful validation and coercion belongs in code anyway. An extra cool part is that nothing ever needs to be escaped, so the content is super clean and unambiguous.

If you want to play around with it, I made NestedTextTo (nt2 on PyPI), for CLI conversion between NestedText and YAML, TOML, or JSON, with a pretty cool (IMO) way to cast value types along the way.

https://nestedtext.org/en/stable/ (not my project)

https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/nestedtextto (my project)

I recently fell in love with the NestedText format, and whipped up a CLI for conversions between it and YAML (and JSON and TOML), so now whenever manually viewing those other formats I pipe it through into readable NestedText. In this example, the result is identical to format A.

So I made nt2 (NestedTextTo) (install from PyPI as nt2[toml] for TOML support).

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...